Food for Families: The state of hunger in West Michigan

GRAND RAPIDS (WZZM) - The WZZM 13 Food for Families campaign annually collects more than 100,000 pounds of food to help hungry families in West Michigan. But, over the past few years, the ACCESS food pantry network has dealt with ever growing needs for food assistance.

ACCESS has actually seen an 8% decrease in need so far in 2010.  But, this comes after several years of large increases.  In 2009, demand increased 7%, 9% in 2008, 13.5% in 2007, and 7% in 2006.

So, there are still a lot of people out there who need help, 7,000 households per month in fact.

Jessica Marsh is picking up some necessities.  She explains, "Cereals. My kids like the macaroni and cheeses. Vegetables, which is great. Soups."

But, Marsh is not grocery shopping.  She's at the North End Community Ministry, or NECOM, food pantry.  Marsh says, "It's been able to help me and the kids get along.  Get through the hard times.  If we didn't have places like this, we wouldn't have anything right now."

Marsh lost her job a couple months ago when the plant closed and moved to Mexico.  Her husband is a barber, but the family of four's expenses proved to be too much for what he earns.

NECOM is seeing a lot of people like the Marshes, who have lost jobs, creating a great need.  Nicholas Champagne of NECOM says, "It's still high. Even though numbers have leveled off. We're still really busy."

Emma Rosauer of ACCESS says many food pantries in the network have finally started to see demand level off.  She says, "The need had been going up because of everything going on in our economy.  We've seen an overflow of people.  Our pantries were serving beyond capacity for the year 2009.  So now some of our services are leveling off, because there was such an increase that it was beyond what we were able to serve."  But, the need is leveling off at a high level.  Just a few years ago, NECOM served about 500 families are month.  Now, they are serving 750.

Every bit of food makes a difference for families like the Marshes.  Jessica Marsh says, "A big difference.  It gets me through at least a couple of weeks."  She adds, "Please donate to the food drive.  If we didn't have people out there who were generous like that we wouldn't have anything for our kids right now.  And as bad as the economy is right now, we can't afford not to have people that aren't generous and good cause what goes around comes around."